It All Started With A Ride

Dear Readers

I just want to thank anyone who made it through this story and actually liked it.

And I especially want to thank those who went from this story to one of my other stories and the people tell me how my writing style has improved since writing IASWAR.

Truthfully, I hate this story.

Every time I see someone reading it or commenting on it I silently wish it was something else I wrote that they were reading; not this.

"Oh but if you hate it so much why won't you delete it?" Simple; this story got me through a really hard time in my life- all my stories do but this dumb, cringy piece of shit helped me through more than I can begin to express.

I love the characters and the plot and the setting; I loved writing this story when I was merely fourteen years old (which is probably why it's so bad; I was fourteen and it was my first story with no prior planning). I just sat down one day and decided I wanted something more than sadness; I wanted a home, and these characters and the world I built around them became that; they became home.

So no, I'm never deleting this story because as much as I hate that it's blown up; it's also the first story I've ever had blow up. Not only that, but I think it shows my progress as a writer and hopefully how I'll improve in the future.

I know being young when I wrote this isn't an excuse because "teenagers should hold themselves to a higher form of literacy"- whatever one person said about my story in my DMs before Wattpad took that feature off, so I won't say it was "just because I was young" it was also because I had no idea what I was doing; sometimes I still don't.

Nonetheless, I want to say thank you to everyone who's supported me in writing this from my first reader @flamewaver who commented on my story everyday and was still around when it was being wrote, to my very last readers from today; when I'm posting this part/editing it (9/1/24)

You guys mean the world to me, and well- this is everything I dreamed of when I curiously got on this app at eleven years old.

And who knows, maybe in about a year I'll look back at some of my more recent stories and absolutely despise them; maybe one day my sixteen year old self will be looking back taking  about how "Because of her jacket" and "Matchmaker's Match" sucked and how I should've really did better on writing those. All I know right now is that I love all my stories (even the horrible ones I wish I never wrote) because all of the characters in them have a special place in my heart.

So, even if I hate this story; I don't regret writing it, because look how far it's gotten me :)